Serial Recall Performance Research Articles

EXPRESS: Enhanced auditory serial recall of recently presented auditory digits following auditory distractor presentation in blind individuals.

The ability to focus on task-relevant information while ignoring distractors is essential in many everyday life situations. The question of how profound and moderate visual deprivation impacts the engagement with a demanding memory task (top-down control) while ignoring task-irrelevant perceptual information (bottom-up) is not thoroughly understood. In this experiment, 17 blind individuals, 17 visually impaired individuals and 17 sighted controls were asked to recall the sequence of eight auditorily presented digits. Following digit presentation, two auditory distractor streams including a repetitive presentation of the same syllables (steady state sounds) or different syllables (changing state sounds) occurred spoken in different emotional prosodies (happy, fearful, angry, and neutral). Blind individuals not only showed overall superior serial recall performance, but also displayed sustained memory retention for items presented more recently in the sequence (specifically at the fifth to the eighth digit positions) compared to sighted and visually impaired individuals. Furthermore, blind individuals showed a weaker serial position effect compared to visually impaired and sighted individuals. Emotional prosody also impacted serial recall differently in blind, visually impaired and sighted controls: Sighted and visually impaired participants exhibited improved serial recall when steady state sounds carried a fearful or angry prosody. By contrast, in the steady state condition, emotional prosody had no effect on serial recall performance in blind individuals.These findings may be linked to the enhanced ability of blind individuals to flexibly apply a combination of strategies, such as Association and Grouping.

How speech in acoustically different offices influences a working person? – Experiments in two countries

Working during task-irrelevant speech influences workers. Adequate room acoustic design can reduce the negative effects in open-plan offices, but harmonized target values do not exist. Our purpose was to examine the effects of room acoustic design levels on a working person during the exposure to task-irrelevant speech. The Finnish room acoustic regulation was chosen as a reference, as it is one of the strictest worldwide. Three room acoustic conditions were examined: regulation violated (Reg-) (Speech Transmission Index, STI=0.71), regulation fulfilled (Reg0) (STI=0.37), and regulation surpassed (Reg+) (STI=0.16). To examine the generalizability of the results, asimilar experiment was performed in two countries (two languages and laboratories): Finland and Germany (FinGer study, N=98). Experience was measured with questionnaires, performance with visual and auditory serial recall tasks, and physiological stress with heart rate variability. Results did not depend on the country, suggesting that our findings could be similar also in other countries. Speech annoyance and perceived concentration difficulty differed in each condition. With other experience measures, only Reg+ improved experience compared to the two other conditions. Visual serial recall performance was more accurate and faster in Reg+ than in Reg-. Accuracy was also improved in Reg0 compared to Reg-. The physiological stress levels did not depend on the condition. Our study shows that Reg0 was better than Reg- with respect to experience and performance but experience was further improved from Reg0 to Reg+. Therefore, it is beneficial to design room acoustics better than the Finnish regulation to maximize work performance and experience.

Evidence of a metacognitive illusion in stimulus-specific prospective judgments of distraction by background speech

Two experiments served to examine how people arrive at stimulus-specific prospective judgments about the distracting effects of speech on cognitive performance. The direct-access account implies that people have direct metacognitive access to the cognitive effects of sounds that determine distraction. The processing-fluency account implies that people rely on the processing-fluency heuristic to predict the distracting effects of sounds on cognitive performance. To test these accounts against each other, we manipulated the processing fluency of speech by playing speech forward or backward and by playing speech in the participants’ native or a foreign language. Forward speech and native speech disrupted serial recall to the same degree as backward speech and foreign speech, respectively. However, the more fluently experienced forward speech and native speech were incorrectly predicted to be less distracting than backward speech and foreign speech. This provides evidence of a metacognitive illusion in stimulus-specific prospective judgments of distraction by speech, supporting the processing-fluency account over the direct-access account. The difference between more and less fluently experienced speech was largely absent in the participants’ global retrospective judgments of distraction, suggesting that people gain access to comparatively valid cues when experiencing the distracting effects of speech on their serial-recall performance firsthand.

The phonological store of working memory: A critique and an alternative, perceptual-motor, approach to verbal short-term memory.

A key quality of a good theory is its fruitfulness, one measure of which might be the degree to which it compels researchers to test it, refine it, or offer alternative explanations of the same empirical data. Perhaps the most fruitful element of Baddeley and Hitch's (1974) Working Memory framework has been the concept of a short-term phonological store, a discrete cognitive module dedicated to the passive storage of verbal material that is architecturally fractionated from perceptual, language, and articulatory systems. This review discusses how the phonological store construct has served as the main theoretical springboard for an alternative perceptual-motor approach in which serial-recall performance reflects the opportunistic co-opting of the articulatory-planning system and, when auditory material is involved, the products of obligatory auditory perceptual organisation. It is argued that this approach, which rejects the need to posit a distinct short-term store, provides a better account of the two putative empirical hallmarks of the phonological store-the phonological similarity effect and the irrelevant speech effect-and that it shows promise too in being able to account for nonword repetition and word-form learning, the supposed evolved function of the phonological store. The neuropsychological literature cited as strong additional support for the phonological store concept is also scrutinised through the lens of the perceptual-motor approach for the first time and a tentative articulatory-planning deficit hypothesis for the "short-term memory" patient profile is advanced. Finally, the relation of the perceptual-motor approach to other "emergent-property" accounts of short-term memory is briefly considered.

A study on the relationships of acoustic parameters relative to serial recall performance and acoustic satisfaction in open-plan offices

Speech is one of the most annoying noises in an open-plan office. Clear speech reduces work performance, job satisfaction and acoustic satisfaction, and can even weaken mental health. In this study, a laboratory study was conducted to examine the relationships between acoustic parameters and work performance and acoustic satisfaction in open-plan offices. Forty-one students from Huaqiao University in China participated in this study. Their work performance and acoustic environment perceptions were tested under eight acoustic conditions with different speech levels. The serial recall task, a common cognitive task used to determine the effects of indoor environments on work performance in offices, was utilized in this study. Acoustic satisfaction and subjective performance in each acoustic condition were also collected. Examining the relationships of acoustic parameters relative to work performance and acoustic satisfaction in open-plan offices demonstrated that the sound pressure level of speech (LA,S) had a more significant impact on the objective performance of the serial recall task and acoustic satisfaction than background noise level (Lp,A,B) and total sound pressure level (LAeq,total). This work also shows that acoustic dissatisfaction is over 50% when LA,S is up to 48 dBA.

Repetition learning is neither a continuous nor an implicit process

Learning advances through repetition. A classic paradigm for studying this process is the Hebb repetition effect: Immediate serial recall performance improves for lists presented repeatedly as compared to nonrepeated lists. Learning in the Hebb paradigm has been described as a slow but continuous accumulation of long-term memory traces over repetitions [e.g., Page & Norris, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 364, 3737-3753 (2009)]. Furthermore, it has been argued that Hebb repetition learning requires no awareness of the repetition, thereby being an instance of implicit learning [e.g., Guérard etal., Mem. Cogn. 39, 1012-1022 (2011); McKelvie, J. Gen. Psychol.114, 75-88 (1987)]. While these assumptions match the data from a group-level perspective, another picture emerges when analyzing data on the individual level. We used a Bayesian hierarchical mixture modeling approach to describe individual learning curves. In two preregistered experiments, using a visual and a verbal Hebb repetition task, we demonstrate that 1) individual learning curves show an abrupt onset followed by rapid growth, with a variable time for the onset of learning across individuals, and that 2) learning onset was preceded by, or coincided with, participants becoming aware of the repetition. These results imply that repetition learning is not implicit and that the appearance of a slow and gradual accumulation of knowledge is an artifact of averaging over individual learning curves.

Serial recall performance under different room acoustic conditions

In office workplaces high demands on the concentration of employees are set. This is contrasted by the effect of irrelevant speech, which has been shown to decrease working memory performance. The presented survey investigates the impact of different room acoustic conditions on the irrelevant speech effect. To address this question, the decrease of performance was investigated by a serial recall test using a within-subject design. Six stimuli were used for the experiment: silence as reference, pink noise, two speech signals with different degrees of fluctuation strength, each presented in room acoustic conditions with long and without reverberation. Each stimulus is used in twelve trials. One trial consisted of the representation phase of nine digits, sequentially presented in random order and the recall phase. Furthermore, different test designs were used. In the first design the playback of the stimulus was continuing during twelve trials. In the second design each trial had a randomised stimulus playback. In addition, the annoyance was assessed, and a closing interview conducted. The results of the study with 44 participants are presented and discussed in this contribution. Overall, a significant decrease in performance is observed in the speech conditions compared to the reference condition.

The Fate of the Unattended Revisited: Can Irrelevant Speech Prime the Non-dominant Interpretation of Homophones?

ABSTRACT Whether the post-categorical, semantic properties of task-irrelevant speech are processed has been a source of debate between two central accounts. The first, a structural account, proposes that the semantic content of irrelevant speech is filtered out early on, and thus remains unprocessed. The second account proposes that the semantic content of speech is, in fact, processed and can influence later behavior. The present research offers a resolution between these two prominent accounts by examining whether semantic processing of task-irrelevant speech occurs despite explicit instructions to ignore it. During a visual-verbal serial recall paradigm, participants were auditorily presented with non-dominant homophones plus their close associates, or close associates without the homophone itself and asked to ignore this irrelevant speech containing these semantic primes. In a subsequent “unrelated” phase, we assessed whether the spelling of homophones was influenced by the irrelevant speech that had occurred earlier in the serial recall phase. We found evidence of semantic priming in conditions wherein the homophone was present, as well as conditions wherein only associates of the homophone were present. Regardless of whether they were presented, homophones were more likely to be spelt in accordance with their non-dominant meaning, and most participants did not report awareness of this fact. We suggest that semantic processing of irrelevant speech occurs even when there is an explicit direction to ignore it and does not result in any material disruptive effect on serial recall performance.

Process-Sensitivity of the Changing-State Effect – Three Methodological Issues Regarding the Current Evidence Base

ABSTRACT The finding that irrelevant sound that changes from one token to the next disrupts serial recall performance more strongly than steady-state sound is well established as the changing-state-effect in the auditory distraction literature. Two of the dominant accounts of irrelevant sound effects differ in whether they expect the changing-state effect to be process-sensitive. According to the duplex-mechanism account, changing-state effects are restricted to tasks in which participants process order information. According to an attentional capture account, they should occur independent of the role of order information. In this review, we give an overview of studies investigating the process-sensitivity of the changing-state effect and discuss three methodological issues with the current evidence base and how they have already been addressed in some studies. One issue concerns the difficulties arising from comparing tasks that are supposed to differ only in the necessity to retain order information, but that may also differ in other aspects. A second issue concerns the need to consider what participants actually do when performing a task rather than to rely solely on task analyses. The final issue concerns the pitfalls associated with testing for null effects. Based on these considerations, we conclude that the question of process-sensitivity is far from settled and make suggestions for how to minimize these problems in future research.

A laboratory study correlating serial recall performance and speech intelligibility of Chinese language in open-plan offices

Speech noise can reduce occupants' work performance in open-plan offices. Some models have been created to predict the effect of speech of different intelligibility on work performance. However, few of them consider the effects of speech intelligibility in Chinese environments. This study aims to develop a model that evaluates how much work performance is decreased by speech noise with different intelligibility in Chinese open-plan offices. A laboratory experiment has been conducted in this paper to determine the effects of different speech intelligibility on occupants' objective performance of the serial recall task and perceived speech disturbance in Chinese open-plan offices. Then, a prediction model was developed by analyzing the data from this experiment and two previous studies. These two studies researched the effects of the Speech Transmission Index (STI, an objective parameter of speech intelligibility) on the serial recall performance in Chinese environments. According to the prediction model of serial recall performance in Chinese environments, performance decrease occurs within the STI range of 0.31–0.47. The comparison of curves between STI and DP with previous studies shows that the STI range for serial recall performance variation in Chinese environments is narrower than in non-Chinese language environments. Furthermore, the DP average change rate of serial recall tasks in Chinese environments is not less compared to non-Chinese environments, although the effect of speech noise on serial recall performance is lower in the Chinese environment. • The effect of STI on serial recall performance in Chinese environments is studied. • A STI-DP model for Chinese open-plan offices (COPOs) is first developed. • Occupants' serial recall performance decreases with the STI in COPOs. • Work performance decrease occurs within the STI range of 0.31–0.47 in COPOs. • The STI range in Chinese environments is narrower than in non-Chinese environments.

Independent effects of word concreteness and word valence on immediate serial recall.

The present study examined the roles of word concreteness and word valence in the immediate serial recall task. Emotion words (e.g. happy) were used to investigate these effects. Participants completed study-test trials with 7-item study lists consisting of positive or negative words with either high or low concreteness (Experiments 1 and 2) and neutral (i.e. non-emotion) words with either high or low concreteness (Experiment 2). In serial recall performance, we replicated the typical item concreteness effect (concrete words are better recalled than abstract words) and obtained an item valence effect (positive/neutral words are better recalled than negative words). However, there was no concreteness×valence interaction. We conclude that both word valence and word concreteness independently contribute to the serial order retention of emotion words in the immediate serial recall task.

The Irrelevant Sound Effect on Serial Recall Is Independent of Age and Inhibitory Control

ABSTRACT The Irrelevant Sound Effect (ISE) refers to the disruptive effects of irrelevant and to-be-ignored sounds on cognitive performance. It is an empirical phenomenon of great practical relevance in environments in which cognitive performance has to be achieved in the presence of task-irrelevant background sounds, e.g., in classrooms and study environments. The present study aims to test for developmental differences in susceptibility to classroom noise while taking individual inhibitory control into account. To this end, younger children (8–10 years, n 1 = 57), older children (11–12 years; n 2 = 73) and adults (19–32 years; n 3 = 52) worked on a serial recall task and a paired-associative recall task during classroom noise as irrelevant changing-state sound and during silence. We found that the serial recall performance was similarly impaired by classroom noise in all three age-groups. In contrast, disruption by classroom noise was not evident in paired-associative recall in any age group. Individual susceptibility to the detrimental noise impact was neither associated with age nor with inhibitory control as measured by means of the Stroop task. Theoretical implications of the findings for explaining developmental differences in the ISE by interference- or attention-based mechanisms are discussed.

Working memory recruits long-term memory when it is beneficial: Evidence from the Hebb effect.

When encoding task-relevant information in working memory (WM), we can use prior knowledge to facilitate task performance. For instance, when memorizing a phone number, we can benefit from recognizing some parts as known chunks (e.g., 911) and focus on memorizing the novel parts. Prior knowledge from long-term memory (LTM), however, can also proactively interfere with WM contents. Here, we show that WM selectively recruits information from LTM only when it is helpful, not when it would interfere. We used variants of the Hebb paradigm in which WM is tested through immediate serial recall of lists. Some lists were repeated frequently across trials, so they were acquired in LTM, as reflected in increasing serial-recall performance across repetitions. We compared interference conditions in which that LTM knowledge could interfere with holding another list in WM to a neutral condition in which that knowledge could be neither beneficial nor harmful. In Experiments 1-3, lists in the interference conditions shared their items with the learned lists but not their order. We observed no proactive interference. In Experiments 4 and 5, the interference lists' first three items overlapped exactly with the learned lists, and only the remaining items had a new order. This made LTM knowledge partially beneficial and partially harmful. Participants could use LTM flexibly to improve performance for the first part of the list without experiencing interference on the second half. LTM-mediated learning of the first part even boosted memory for the unknown second part. We conclude that there is a flexible gate controlling the flow of information from LTM and WM so that LTM knowledge is recruited only when helpful. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The metacognition of auditory distraction: Judgments about the effects of deviating and changing auditory distractors on cognitive performance

The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction has been extended to predict that people should have metacognitive awareness of the disruptive effect of auditory deviants on cognitive performance but little to no such awareness of the disruptive effect of changing-state relative to steady-state auditory distractors. To test this prediction, we assessed different types of metacognitive judgments about the disruptive effects of auditory-deviant, changing-state, and steady-state distractor sequences on serial recall. In a questionnaire, participants read about an irrelevant-speech experiment and were asked to provide metacognitive beliefs about how serial-recall performance would be affected by the different types of distractors. Another sample of participants heard the auditory distractors before predicting how their own serial-recall performance would suffer or benefit from the distractors. After participants had experienced the disruptive effects of the distractor sequences first hand, they were asked to make episodic retrospective judgments about how they thought the distractor sequences had affected their performance. The results consistently show that people are, on average, well aware of the greater disruptive effect of deviant and changing-state relative to steady-state distractors. Irrespective of condition, prospective and retrospective judgments of distraction were poor predictors of the individual susceptibility to distraction. These findings suggest that phenomena of auditory distraction cannot be categorized in two separate classes based on metacognitive awareness.

Following Instructions in Working Memory: Do Older Adults Show the Enactment Advantage?

In young adults, the ability to verbally recall instructions in working memory is enhanced if the sequences are physically enacted by the participant (self-enactment) or the experimenter (demonstration) during encoding. Here we examine the effects of self-enactment and demonstration at encoding on working memory performance in older and younger adults. Fifty young (18-23 years) and 40 older (60-89 years) adults listened to sequences of novel action-object pairs before verbally recalling them in the correct order. There were three different encoding conditions: spoken only, spoken + demonstration, and spoken + self-enactment. We included two different levels of difficulty to investigate whether task complexity moderated the effect of encoding condition and whether this differed between age groups. Relative to the spoken only condition, demonstration significantly improved young and older adults' serial recall performance, but self-enactment only enhanced performance in the young adults, and this boost was smaller than the one gained through demonstration. Our findings suggest that additional spatial-motoric information is beneficial for older adults when the actions are demonstrated to them, but not when the individual must enact the instructions themselves.

Working memory and serial order: Evidence against numerical order codes but for item-position associations.

The processing of ordinally organized information is a characteristic of both serial-order working memory and numerical cognition. Serial positions of items presented within a list follow an ordinal organization when stored in working memory, whereas numbers are based on an ordinal structure stored in long-term memory. We tested the hypothesis that long-term numerical ordinal representations support the coding of temporary serial position information in working memory. In Experiment 1, learned word-number associations appeared to have a negative instead of a positive impact on immediate serial recall performance relative to control conditions. Experiments 2 showed that this effect was due to a stronger opportunity for learning associations of words to serial positions in the control lists as compared to the experimental lists. Experiment 3 showed that when controlling for these positional learning effects, there was no reliable effect of learned word-number associations on immediate serial recall performance. This study indicates that numerical codes do not play a major role in coding serial position information in working tasks. At the same time, the robust item-position learning effects demonstrate a contribution of long-term item-position associations to immediate memory for order. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The articulatory determinants of verbal sequence learning.

Two experiments (N = 154 in total) using the Hebb repetition effect-the enhancement of serial recall performance for a repeated sequence in among otherwise nonrepeated sequences-reveal a key role for active articulatory-planning processes in verbal sequence learning, contrary to a prominent, phonological-store based, model (Burgess & Hitch, 2006). First, Hebb sequence learning was attenuated when articulatory planning of the to-be-remembered sequence was restricted by articulatory suppression. This was less the case with auditory sequences, however, suggesting that passive perceptual organization processes operating independently of articulation also contribute to the learning of sequences presented auditorily. Second, sequence learning was enhanced for phonologically similar compared to dissimilar items when that learning was particularly reliant on articulatory planning (i.e., with visual sequences). That this enhanced learning was eliminated when articulatory planning was restricted also points to an articulatory basis for this 'phonological' similarity effect. Third, an inconsistent temporal grouping of items across instances of the repeating sequence also abolished learning but only when that grouping-based on independent evidence from output response-times during serial recall-was instantiated within an articulatory plan. These results are the first to suggest that verbal sequence learning, and not only verbal serial short-term memory (STM) performance, may be explicable by recourse to general-purpose articulatory and perceptual processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The varying nature of semantic effects in working memory

Several studies have demonstrated an influence of semantic knowledge on verbal working memory (WM) performance, such as shown by the observation of semantic relatedness (related vs. unrelated words) and word imageability (high vs. low imageability words) effects in working memory. The present study extends these observations by examining in four experiments the extent to which semantic knowledge can protect WM representations against interference. We assessed immediate serial recall performance for semantically related vs. unrelated word lists and for high vs. low imageability word lists, with memory lists being followed by an interfering task after encoding or not. Results show that semantic relatedness leads to a stronger protective effect against interference than word imageability at the item level. Furthermore, the semantic relatedness had a stronger impact on WM performance than word imageability; this was further supported by a meta-analysis of all relevant studies in the field. These results suggest that inter-item associative semantic knowledge can protect WM content against interference, but less so item-level semantic knowledge. This protective effect may result from between-item recurrent reactivation or from reduced cognitive load via the compression of memoranda into conceptual units, as further supported by a series of computational simulations.

Serial Recall Predicts Vocoded Sentence Recognition Across Spectral Resolutions.

PurposeThe goal of this study was to determine how various aspects of cognition predict speech recognition ability across different levels of speech vocoding within a single group of listeners.MethodWe tested the ability of young adults (N = 32) with normal hearing to recognize Perceptually Robust English Sentence Test Open-set (PRESTO) sentences that were degraded with a vocoder to produce different levels of spectral resolution (16, eight, and four carrier channels). Participants also completed tests of cognition (fluid intelligence, short-term memory, and attention), which were used as predictors of sentence recognition. Sentence recognition was compared across vocoder conditions, predictors were correlated with individual differences in sentence recognition, and the relationships between predictors were characterized.ResultsPRESTO sentence recognition performance declined with a decreasing number of vocoder channels, with no evident floor or ceiling performance in any condition. Individual ability to recognize PRESTO sentences was consistent relative to the group across vocoder conditions. Short-term memory, as measured with serial recall, was a moderate predictor of sentence recognition (ρ = 0.65). Serial recall performance was constant across vocoder conditions when measured with a digit span task. Fluid intelligence was marginally correlated with serial recall, but not sentence recognition. Attentional measures had no discernible relationship to sentence recognition and a marginal relationship with serial recall.ConclusionsVerbal serial recall is a substantial predictor of vocoded sentence recognition, and this predictive relationship is independent of spectral resolution. In populations that show variable speech recognition outcomes, such as listeners with cochlear implants, it should be possible to account for the independent effects of spectral resolution and verbal serial recall in their speech recognition ability.Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12021051

Does the Survival Processing Memory Advantage Translate to Serial Recall?

The survival processing effect describes the phenomenon that memory for items is better after they have been processed in the context of a fitness-related survival scenario as compared to alternative processing contexts. In the present study, we examined whether the survival processing memory advantage translates to memory for the order of processed items. Across two serial-recall experiments, we replicated the survival processing effect for free recall but did not find an additional survival processing advantage for serial recall when we controlled serial recall performance for the total number of words recalled per person. Adjusted serial recall performance was not better in the survival processing condition when compared to a moving and a relational pleasantness processing condition (Experiment 1), even when processing of the relational order of stimuli was explicitly endorsed in the survival processing task (Experiment 2). This finding is in line with the idea that enhanced item-specific rather than enhanced relational processing of items underlies the survival processing effect. Moreover, our findings indicate that survival processing does not increase memory efficiency for temporal context information.